By Martin Hellicar
DISY yesterday unveiled their big coup: not just one but two former top members of rival party Diko are joining their ranks.
The defection of Petros Voskarides, a former senior Diko member, had been confirmed on Friday, but governing Disy’s bigger ‘catch’, independent deputy Katerina Pantelidou, who was elected to the House on a Diko ticket in 1996, had been only rumour until yesterday.
Disy leader Nicos Anastassiades announced both new arrivals at yesterday’s party conference in Nicosia.
He read out to delegates letters from both Pantelidou and Voskarides explaining their reasons for ditching centre-right Diko to join right-wing Disy.
Pantelidou’s missive echoed what Voskarides had stated on Friday, that Disy was a more “progressive” party.
Diko leader Spyros Kyprianou reacted angrily to the blow to his party, saying such defections were motivated solely by over-ambition.
“There are cases where a person’s ambition is such that no-one can allow for it, there are cases where they could not accept something unless they could be certain they would be in the party leadership,” he said. “No one has ever left the Diko party for reasons of principle.”
Kyprianou’s party has been in turmoil ever since it backed a loser in the February presidential elections.
Voskarides and Pantelidou broke ranks with Diko in the run-up to those elections, unhappy at the party decision to abandon a government coalition with Disy to join with left-wing Akel in backing candidate George Iacovou. Two other Diko big-wigs, Interior Minister Dinos Michaelides and deputy Alexis Galanos, jumped ship at the same time in protest at the same decision.
Kyprianou yesterday charged that President Clerides had engineered these dissentions in an attempt to bolster his re-election campaign.
“It was a political coup, helped by the president,” he claimed. The four dissenters were shown the door by Diko after Clerides returned to office on the back of Disy support.
Michaelides was subsequently re-appointed Interior Minister while Galanos was appointed presidential adviser and formed his own party.
Voskarides, who was government spokesman during Kyprianou’s presidency and is now at the Cyprus embassy in Athens as a communications adviser, has called his former party “inflexible” and “cliquey”.
